This is a reread for me, the first time since the book came out in 1998. I was trying to place the book in sequence - it came out after A Song Of Stone and before The Business. The previous science fiction novel was Excession and the next was Look To Windward. Of those, A Song Of Stone was his worst book, and The Business was fun but certainly not his strongest, though I heard him read the prologue in Fred Hanna's Bookshop when I worked there and it was one of the funniest readings I ever heard. Anyway, it's in a funny place. After the misfire of ASOS I wanted a return to the Culture to be a big big bold space opera. Instead I got this, which isn't. I did write a review, though I've no idea where it is, but I know I didn't dare allow myself to feel let down or disappointed, and, frankly, I knew it was too well-written and well-crafted for that, even as I mourned the lack of grandeur. But I think I was.

Now, of course, it's different. He's gone from us way too soon, and we're left with a body of work to enjoy and judge and re-evaluate. I think The Crow Road will remain the best book he ever wrote and the most beloved. But Inversions is a masterpiece, and it achieves that by sheer dint of the one thing Banks was not known for in his writing: restraint. He reined it all back in for this, two concurrent stories set on the same world featuring a Doctor to a King and a Bodyguard to a Regicide. It might be a quasi-historical fantasy novel save for the many moons and the falling space rocks and various other clues that we're in a different genre. The setting is not so much drab as understated, and in many ways unexceptional - societies emerging from feudalism, caught somewhere between Reformation and Enlightenment. There is a great deal of courtly intrigue and political maneuvering and suggestions of social reform. All of those in power are men. There are harems and concubines and serving girls. There is the Doctor, who keeps the King healthy, there is the Bodyguard, who kills the Protector's enemies. They are from a different Culture. They represent differing philosophical approaches to intervention by an advanced Culture into a less advanced culture. It is not as obvious as it seems who represents which approach.

So, no explosions, no battles, no mind-bending cosmic science, no vast entities, no mind-boggling warfare, just these two stories, which do converge but most assuredly not in the dazzling, head-wrecking narrative coup of Use Of Weapons. Instead, Banks creates his most literary of science fiction novels, exploring the theme set out in the title. As a science fiction novel, it is an inversion of all his other novels by sheer dint of the restraint in style and setting. The doctor and the bodyguard are inversions, as are the king and the regicide. But it is power that is inverted most, and what is at first the casual scenery of misogyny, the jokes, the crude or clever lecherous references, the dismissals, the insignificance of women in both settings, becomes the overwhelming heart of the story. If this is a world creaking towards progress, women are the afterthought, and a kind of rage builds, a hidden and barely detectable undercurrent of horror.

Because of course, the Doctor is a woman. She alone of all the women appears to be granted agency within this world, for all that she must bravely defy convention and face danger as arrogant men conspire to bring her down. But there is an inversion there, too. She is not one of the women of this world. She is armed with knowledge, and more than knowledge, she is protected. Of course, she is the character we identify with, root for, cheer on to defy these irredeemable sexists. The women of this world have no such privileges and while we sympathise with their plight, they are background dressing, the necessary illustrations of the backwardness of this world, to give the Doctor's position a more heroic stature. Which is how Banks delivers a salutary lesson in the shallowness of tourism in developing civilisations, whether you be a reader or an agent in special circumstances, and that no matter how much of a long view you try to take and how much you debate your philosophies of intervention and what is necessary to do the right thing, these little people are real and they demand justice, or revenge.

Banks started the Culture series from the point of view of one of its enemies. Inversions pulls the rug out from under Special Circumstances and holds it up to show the real blood from real people staining it. I now think it is one of his finest works, and I hope that if you first read it when it came out, or in sequence with the rest of his books, and felt let down by all the things that it does not contain, you'll go back and give it a chance and appreciate it for what it does contain.